Earlier this month, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti delivered the keynote at LA CoMotion, a five-day conference and public expo showcasing some of the world’s most advanced transportation technology. Among the most impressive technology were automatic self-driving cars, electric scooters, a tiny group of miniature robots, and a 3D-printed race car. The invitation-only event, which took place in the Arts District in DTLA, garnered hundreds of global leaders, policymakers, and industry players looking to examine the future of urban mobility. 

LA CoMotion had many Angelenos pondering the city’s current transportation landscape and whether it could ever have a future using self-automated cars. According to CityLab, Garcetti seemed to think so, and even stated in his keynote that his goal for Los Angeles was for it “to be the transportation technology capital of the world.” Although the vast city has a long way to go, especially with its never-ending traffic, it seems the City of Angels has already been laying down a framework for a driverless future. 

Rendering courtesy of The Boring Company 

In recent years, LA’s westside neighborhoods including Playa Vista, Playa Del Rey, Westchester, Santa Monica, Culver City, El Segundo, West LA, and Venice have seen the rise of Silicon Beach, which is now a burgeoning tech base for both major corporations and start-up companies. Meanwhile, tech visionaries such as Elon Musk are paving the way towards a driverless future with his Boring Tunnels, a high-speed subterranean transportation system meant to relieve LA traffic. 

Although many of the city’s officials and tech experts have high hopes for the city’s future position as a global capital of urban mobility, it’s still in its infant stages. There’s still a long way to go before Los Angeles can have self-automated cars.

It was this early mass transit system (for a time, the most extensive in the nation) that helped power L.A.’s sprawl and single-family character. Paid for by real estate companies, the streetcars were intended not just to connect outlying suburbs, but also sell them to prospective homeowners. The goals of L.A.’s self-proclaimed “tech mayor” aren’t as pie-in-the-sky as they might seem. Taken together, L.A.’s aerospace and manufacturing past, growing Silicon Beach tech community, and coming influx of investment in transit infrastructure make the city uniquely primed for a leadership role in a new transit future. Seventy percent of Los Angeles commuters still drive to work, but the civic zeitgeist is shifting—and the city is positioning itself as a laboratory of sorts for transportation innovators and startups. The car-less Angeleno remains an occasional punchline, but it’s become a decidedly lazier one.

Last November, L.A. voters overwhelmingly approved Measure M, a half-cent sales tax that will fund an unprecedented $120 billion in transit projects over the next 40 years. The scope of investment may be unprecedented for the city, but the ballot-box show of faith in Metro, the nation’s second-largest transit agency, was not. In fact, Measure M was the fourth such sales tax to support transit investment voted into place by Angelenos since the 1980s.

Photo courtesy of Metro96

He’s on board: L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti greets riders on the Metro Red Line in December 2016. (AP) The much-heralded 2016 opening of the second phase of Metro’s Expo Line re-connected downtown to Santa Monica via rail for the first time since 1953. Although the Expo Line may not have dramatically improved travel times (the full trip takes roughly 50 minutes, slower than the freeway in all but the very worst of traffic jams), it represented a symbolic shift in a city where public transit had long been seen as a last resort.

By 2019, the under-construction Crenshaw Line is slated to bring light rail through parts of historically underserved South L.A. and link the airport to the Metro Rail system. And by 2027, Metro’s Purple Line Extension should be complete, providing—at long last!—uninterrupted subway service under the Wilshire Corridor, all the way from downtown to Westwood. The 2028 Olympics also loom on the horizon: That’s driving Garcetti’s “28 by 28” initiative, which aims to complete 28 Metro projects, from bus rapid transit lines to a proposed on-demand microtransit program, by the time the Games begin.

Perhaps even further in the future: Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk just officially filed plans to dig below the city for his alternate transportation system—an elaborate system of private tunnels equipped with “electric skates” that boost vehicles (and capsules of pedestrians and cyclists) up to 130 MPH, so those with means can avoid more conventional modes entirely.

The gulf between our glittering future and the reality of being a transit-dependent Angeleno was apparent once I made my way to the bus stop. Autonomous vehicles are going to be a part of that process. making L.A. the first major U.S. city to specifically address policies around self-driving cars. L.A. also recently implemented an electric vehicle car-sharing system targeted at low-income communities, and Metro has committed that all its buses will run on battery electric power by 2030.

Photo courtesy of Sharon Hahn Darlin

But L.A. has a long way to go, and many basic elements to hammer out, before it can transform into a showpiece for AVs, EVs, or underground tubes full of Teslas. “Focusing on the deployment of new technologies is good, but let’s not forget the basics,” as Move LA founder Denny Zane put it during a Saturday LA CoMotion panel on the “Los Angeles’ Mobility Revolution.”

Without dedicated lanes, buses (which account for the vast majority of Metro trips) have to sit in traffic just like the rest of the cars on the road. That same gridlock makes for a notoriously not-entirely-reliable bus system, where riders like me would rather walk a mile than have to transfer bus lines—and risk being stranded mid-trip for an indeterminate amount of time.